“Aha! It’s not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers.”
This whole chunk skeeves me out, since it seems to treat women as something “other” than men, all built to a specific template.
Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
This also felt like an unsupported generalization. I think the post would benefit a lot if you framed these as “worked for me to accomplish X”. i.e. “When trying to pick up attractive women for a one-night stand, math was never the rights subject for me” (And if you still can’t flirt about math and programming, and those are important to you, then you either live in a very suboptimal city, or you’re doing it wrong >.>)
This whole chunk skeeves me out, since it seems to treat women as something “other” than men, all built to a specific template.
But they are, on average, reliably different from average men in certain predictable ways.
And yes, it sucks for non-gender-typical women that the best set of priors that men can achieve fails to describe how those women actually work. But when you think about it, the situation is that both gender-atypical women and PUAs are languishing under the statistical tyranny of gender-typical women. Original
I don’t know what your experience is mixing flirting with “Politics, religion, math, and programming” but given that these are all Far mode subjects and flirting is Near, mixing them seems likely to be on average sub-optimal. If you can think of a way of mixing the two besides puns I’d be grateful to hear it.
But they are, on average, reliably different from average men in certain predictable ways.
I’m skeeved exactly because it felt like an assertion that women are mythical “other” objects without actually providing any evidence that this is one of those “reliably different” situations.
Men value confidence, notice clothing, and I’m pretty sure they’re attracted to positive subjective experiences. I’ll concede I have no clue about male vs female body language—maybe men are genuinely oblivious to it, but I doubt it.
So unless there’s some extremely shocking studies I’m not aware of, calling any of these “female” traits is bullshit.
the best set of priors that men can achieve
And right here is why it skeeves me out: It treats women as a single-purpose object, and if you just have the right priors, you can do anything. The right priors for “casual sex with the hot women at the bar” are different from the priors you want to use when forming a healthy, long-term relationship.
Lukeprog has here, a post about relationships. The priors for a relationship are not the priors for a pick up artist. Yet he diverges in to PUA territory, apparently without even realizing that he’s made that mistake.
I didn’t say there was a universally compelling pickup line. I didn’t mention PUA.
I did link directly to twosummaries of the most recent mainstream scientific research on intimate relationships and relationship initiation.
So unless there’s some extremely shocking studies I’m not aware of, calling any of these “female” traits is bullshit.
I won’t take the time to respond to all your concerns, but here’s just a sampling from the book I linked to above. On women preferring confidence (p. 17):
What approaches work best as conversational openers? Much of the research examining the effectiveness of openers has focused on those deployed to initiate male–female encounters in meeting places. The best openers for men, this research shows, appear to be those that are not seen as “lines” by women: Confident, direct, or innocuous overtures are more likely to get a conversation off to a good start than are indirect, cute, or clever gambits (Clark et al., 1999; Cunningham, 1989; Kleinke & Dean, 1990).
On status (partially displayed by confidence), and ambition (p. 58):
Although [sexual strategies theory (SST), the mainstream view] views both sexes as having long-term and short-term mating strategies within their repertoire, men and women are predicted to differ psychologically in what they desire (i.e., mate choice) and in how they tactically pursue (i.e., initiate) romantic relationships. In long-term mate choice, the sexes are predicted to differ in several respects. Men are hypothesized to possess adaptations that lead them to place a greater mate choice premium during long-term mating on signals of fertility and reproductive value, such as a woman’s youth and physical appearance (Buss, 1989; Jones, 1995; Kenrick & Keefe, 1992; Singh, 1993; Symons, 1979). Men also prefer long-term mates who are sexually faithful and are capable of good parenting (see Table 3.1). Women, in contrast, are hypothesized to place a greater premium during long-term mating on a man’s status, resources, ambition, and maturity (cues relevant to his ability for long-term provisioning), as well as his kindness, generosity, and emotional openness (cues to his willingness to provide for women and their children) (Buunk, Dijkstra, Kenrick, & Warntjes, 2001; Cashdan, 1993; Ellis, 1992; Feingold, 1992; Townsend & Wasserman, 1998)...
Numerous survey and meta-analytic studies have confirmed many of the major tenets of SST, including the fact that men and women seeking long-term mates desire different attributes in potential partners (e.g., Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, Todd, & Finch, 1997; Jensen?Campbell, Graziano, & West, 1995; Kruger, Fisher, & Jobling, 2003; Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002; Regan, 1998a, 1998b; Regan & Berscheid, 1997; Urbaniak & Kilmann, 2003). Several investigators have replicated or confirmed SST-related findings using nationally representative, cross-cultural, or multicultural samples (Feingold, 1992; Knodel, Low, Saengtienchai, & Lucas, 1997; Schmitt et al., 2003; Sprecher, Sullivan, & Hatfield, 1994; Walter, 1997). For example, in a recent Internet study of 119,733 men and 98,462 women across 53 nations, Lippa (2007) replicated the classic evolutionary finding of men’s greater desires, relative to women, for long-term mates who are physically attractive. Women, in contrast to men, tended to report greater preferences for long-term mates who display cues to the ability and willingness to provide resources (e.g., intelligence, kindness, and dependability; see Lippa, 2007). Other investigators have validated key SST hypotheses concerning sex differences in long-term mate choice using nonsurvey techniques such as studying actual mate attraction, marital choice, spousal conflict, and divorce (Betzig, 1989; Dawson & McIntosh, 2006; Kenrick, Neuberg, Zierk, & Krones, 1994; Salmon & Symons, 2001; Schmitt, Couden, & Baker, 2001; Townsend & Wasserman, 1998; Wiederman, 1993). These experimental, behavioral, and naturalistic methodologies suggest that evolutionary-supportive findings are not merely stereotype artifacts or social desirability biases limited to self-reported mate choice.
A few reliable differences between men’s and women’s [mating] priorities have been found, and these differences appear to be nearly universal across cultures… women tend to place a higher value than men on potential partners’ socioeconomic status, intelligence, ambition, and financial prospects. In contrast, men consistently show more interest than women in potential partners’ youthfulness and physical attractiveness (Buss & Kenrick, 1998)… Most theorists explain these gender disparities in terms of evolutionary concepts (Archer, 1996; Buss, 1996; Fletcher, 2002).
If you’d like the titles for some of the individual papers, I’d be willing to spend the time to type up a few of them for you.
I believe my point has been missed: Are you claiming that men don’t enjoy “positive subjective experiences”? If yes, what studies and evidence. If no, why are you calling out women specifically as enjoying this, instead of just saying “people enjoy X in a mate”?
I’m not saying you’re wrong about women liking these things. I’m not saying men and women are the same. I’m saying in this particular case, it seems like you’ve found a human universal, not a female universal, and thus it would make more sense to say “Aha! People like confidence in a mate!” Your first study addresses confidence, but not gender disparity. The other two suggest gender disparity, but not in any of the specific traits your post cited.
Aha! It’s not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers.
This doesn’t suggest a gender disparity, merely that I now understood something about how the ‘women love jerks’ meme had been started, and what was actually going on.
But, as it turns out, there is a gender disparity here. Women place a higher premium on status and ambition than men do (see the studies cited in my comment above). Women also place a higher premium than men do on confidence. See here.
Next, I said:
Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words.
This suggests no gender disparity. It merely says that body language and fashion are powerful signaling tools, which they are.
Aha! Women are attracted to men with whom they have positive subjective experiences. That’s why they like funny guys, for example!
You’re right, this does imply a gender disparity that isn’t clearly supported by any studies I know about. Correction accepted. Oops. Perhaps a better example would have been the importance of touching during relationship initiation—for both men and women.
Assuming for the moment no issue with the sources you cite (I could pull a couple books off my shelf as well and bombard you with quotes and citations I hadn’t vetted or summarized for you just as well, but it would be awfully obnoxious of me and more than a bit dishonest), I find myself asking: do women pay more attention to status and resource acquisition because that’s fundamental to how women view the world? Like, the way things work in our intensive-industrial, urbanized, capitalist highly-atomized society just happen to fundamentally express human nature?
(And is that parsimonious, when studies of the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States#Gender_gap“>gender gap strongly suggest that the different cross-sectional representation of men and women in society is unlikely to be solely or even primarily attributable to fundamental cognitive differences between sexes, and early, gender-differentiated social conditioning paired with stereotype threat can strongly account for the real-world life situations that ultimately influence those differences in outcomes?)
You, and many many other LWers, have bought into a rather Flintstonized view of human nature as regards sex and gender differences. Anecdotally it fails to accord with my experiences, but more importantly it feels like you’re massively overstating the confidence of your interpretation of these more-ambiguous studies, for which many studies with contrary conclusions can be found. Basically, this feels like [Motivated Stopping[(http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_continuation/)
Hang on a second! If it seems unfair to you that Luke makes generalizations about woman and draws conclusions from too little evidence, you should try to make sure you aren’t doing the same thing. LessWrong is not one homogenous community, and I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to conclude that a majority, or even a substantial minority, buys into a Flintstonized version of human nature. On this thread alone, some of the most highly upvoted comments have been those criticizing Luke’s post for seeming to implicitly endorse a simplified view of romance and women.
My ISP has eaten this response twice now (apparently if you try to comment while offline / having connection issues, it locks the post from copying/editing, and there’s no way to try to repost it, argh), so I will just say: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ap/of_gender_and_rationality/32l5 this is not an isolated incident, but I really have no clue how prevalent it is.
Yeah, I’ve read through most of LessWrong’s “gender wars” last year, and I’ll stand by the statement that most LW contributors don’t hold the attitude Jandila critiques.
Specifically, the impression I get from Luke’s post is that his study of rationality over the last couple years coincided with his study of his own attitudes/feelings/decisions in the realm of romance, and that he was eager to make the connections between the rationality skills and the specific example of his dating life. Unfortunately, he stepped on the anthill of LessWrong gender resentment (which goes both ways: those annoyed by the stereotyping and those annoyed by the other ones for getting annoyed so easily). Reading him charitably, he made observations about his own life without intending anyone to generalize. Reading slightly less charitably, he’s internalized a couple of stereotypes to the extent he didn’t even realize that they were stereotypes and that he would invoke them.
Either way, I think sexism is very rare on LW, and stereotyping that can lead to inadvertent sexism isn’t uncommon, but also isn’t typical.
apparently if you try to comment while offline / having connection issues, it locks the post from copying/editing, and there’s no way to try to repost it, argh
This is why I use the Lazarus plugin for chrome or Firefox. It remembers everything you type into a form.
It’s obnoxious and “more than a bit dishonest” for me to cite scientific studies without taking precious time out of my day to also summarize them and explain all their complexities and their interactions with other research? That isn’t what you mean, right?
What I mean is that it strongly looks like you just grabbed a book off your shelf, typed what it said, and haven’t necessarily got any clue what those studies actually say in any meaningful sense. A bit of googling for some of them, and reading the available abstracts, reinforced that perception.
Jandila, you haven’t been here long enough to know this unless you’re a long-time lurker; but lukeprog has an outstanding reputation as a scholar. He consistently supports his posts with large numbers of painstakingly cited studies, and has written guides on how to do scholarship.
So, for you to successfully attack him on his scholarship here, you would first have to build a good reputation for seeing flaws that nobody else has noticed, or build a really, really good case behind your accusation and present the whole thing.
With your comments here, you didn’t do either of those, so they weren’t received very well. But LW isn’t the kind of community that punishes people for having been wrong. If you stick around, and learn the standards of evidence and argumentation that play well here, who knows—you might eventually convince LWers of your point.
So… you personally would have been happier with short descriptions of the experiments suggesting these conclusions, and a bunch of verbose footnotes that discuss some of the complexities of the research, like I’ve done in manyotherposts?
This whole chunk skeeves me out, since it seems to treat women as something “other” than men, all built to a specific template.
This also felt like an unsupported generalization. I think the post would benefit a lot if you framed these as “worked for me to accomplish X”. i.e. “When trying to pick up attractive women for a one-night stand, math was never the rights subject for me” (And if you still can’t flirt about math and programming, and those are important to you, then you either live in a very suboptimal city, or you’re doing it wrong >.>)
But they are, on average, reliably different from average men in certain predictable ways.
I don’t know what your experience is mixing flirting with “Politics, religion, math, and programming” but given that these are all Far mode subjects and flirting is Near, mixing them seems likely to be on average sub-optimal. If you can think of a way of mixing the two besides puns I’d be grateful to hear it.
I’m skeeved exactly because it felt like an assertion that women are mythical “other” objects without actually providing any evidence that this is one of those “reliably different” situations.
Men value confidence, notice clothing, and I’m pretty sure they’re attracted to positive subjective experiences. I’ll concede I have no clue about male vs female body language—maybe men are genuinely oblivious to it, but I doubt it.
So unless there’s some extremely shocking studies I’m not aware of, calling any of these “female” traits is bullshit.
And right here is why it skeeves me out: It treats women as a single-purpose object, and if you just have the right priors, you can do anything. The right priors for “casual sex with the hot women at the bar” are different from the priors you want to use when forming a healthy, long-term relationship.
Lukeprog has here, a post about relationships. The priors for a relationship are not the priors for a pick up artist. Yet he diverges in to PUA territory, apparently without even realizing that he’s made that mistake.
There is not a Universally Compelling Pick-Up Line.
I didn’t say there was a universally compelling pickup line. I didn’t mention PUA.
I did link directly to two summaries of the most recent mainstream scientific research on intimate relationships and relationship initiation.
I won’t take the time to respond to all your concerns, but here’s just a sampling from the book I linked to above. On women preferring confidence (p. 17):
On status (partially displayed by confidence), and ambition (p. 58):
Or, from this textbook (p. 308):
If you’d like the titles for some of the individual papers, I’d be willing to spend the time to type up a few of them for you.
I believe my point has been missed: Are you claiming that men don’t enjoy “positive subjective experiences”? If yes, what studies and evidence. If no, why are you calling out women specifically as enjoying this, instead of just saying “people enjoy X in a mate”?
I’m not saying you’re wrong about women liking these things. I’m not saying men and women are the same. I’m saying in this particular case, it seems like you’ve found a human universal, not a female universal, and thus it would make more sense to say “Aha! People like confidence in a mate!” Your first study addresses confidence, but not gender disparity. The other two suggest gender disparity, but not in any of the specific traits your post cited.
In my post I said:
This doesn’t suggest a gender disparity, merely that I now understood something about how the ‘women love jerks’ meme had been started, and what was actually going on.
But, as it turns out, there is a gender disparity here. Women place a higher premium on status and ambition than men do (see the studies cited in my comment above). Women also place a higher premium than men do on confidence. See here.
Next, I said:
This suggests no gender disparity. It merely says that body language and fashion are powerful signaling tools, which they are.
You’re right, this does imply a gender disparity that isn’t clearly supported by any studies I know about. Correction accepted. Oops. Perhaps a better example would have been the importance of touching during relationship initiation—for both men and women.
Assuming for the moment no issue with the sources you cite (I could pull a couple books off my shelf as well and bombard you with quotes and citations I hadn’t vetted or summarized for you just as well, but it would be awfully obnoxious of me and more than a bit dishonest), I find myself asking: do women pay more attention to status and resource acquisition because that’s fundamental to how women view the world? Like, the way things work in our intensive-industrial, urbanized, capitalist highly-atomized society just happen to fundamentally express human nature?
(And is that parsimonious, when studies of the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States#Gender_gap“>gender gap strongly suggest that the different cross-sectional representation of men and women in society is unlikely to be solely or even primarily attributable to fundamental cognitive differences between sexes, and early, gender-differentiated social conditioning paired with stereotype threat can strongly account for the real-world life situations that ultimately influence those differences in outcomes?)
You, and many many other LWers, have bought into a rather Flintstonized view of human nature as regards sex and gender differences. Anecdotally it fails to accord with my experiences, but more importantly it feels like you’re massively overstating the confidence of your interpretation of these more-ambiguous studies, for which many studies with contrary conclusions can be found. Basically, this feels like [Motivated Stopping[(http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_continuation/)
Hang on a second! If it seems unfair to you that Luke makes generalizations about woman and draws conclusions from too little evidence, you should try to make sure you aren’t doing the same thing. LessWrong is not one homogenous community, and I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to conclude that a majority, or even a substantial minority, buys into a Flintstonized version of human nature. On this thread alone, some of the most highly upvoted comments have been those criticizing Luke’s post for seeming to implicitly endorse a simplified view of romance and women.
By the way, Welcome to LessWrong!. Feel free to introduce yourself.
Link formatting here isn’t html; the Help link on the right below comments explains the system.
My ISP has eaten this response twice now (apparently if you try to comment while offline / having connection issues, it locks the post from copying/editing, and there’s no way to try to repost it, argh), so I will just say: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ap/of_gender_and_rationality/32l5 this is not an isolated incident, but I really have no clue how prevalent it is.
Yeah, I’ve read through most of LessWrong’s “gender wars” last year, and I’ll stand by the statement that most LW contributors don’t hold the attitude Jandila critiques.
Specifically, the impression I get from Luke’s post is that his study of rationality over the last couple years coincided with his study of his own attitudes/feelings/decisions in the realm of romance, and that he was eager to make the connections between the rationality skills and the specific example of his dating life. Unfortunately, he stepped on the anthill of LessWrong gender resentment (which goes both ways: those annoyed by the stereotyping and those annoyed by the other ones for getting annoyed so easily). Reading him charitably, he made observations about his own life without intending anyone to generalize. Reading slightly less charitably, he’s internalized a couple of stereotypes to the extent he didn’t even realize that they were stereotypes and that he would invoke them.
Either way, I think sexism is very rare on LW, and stereotyping that can lead to inadvertent sexism isn’t uncommon, but also isn’t typical.
This is why I use the Lazarus plugin for chrome or Firefox. It remembers everything you type into a form.
It’s obnoxious and “more than a bit dishonest” for me to cite scientific studies without taking precious time out of my day to also summarize them and explain all their complexities and their interactions with other research? That isn’t what you mean, right?
What I mean is that it strongly looks like you just grabbed a book off your shelf, typed what it said, and haven’t necessarily got any clue what those studies actually say in any meaningful sense. A bit of googling for some of them, and reading the available abstracts, reinforced that perception.
Jandila, you haven’t been here long enough to know this unless you’re a long-time lurker; but lukeprog has an outstanding reputation as a scholar. He consistently supports his posts with large numbers of painstakingly cited studies, and has written guides on how to do scholarship.
So, for you to successfully attack him on his scholarship here, you would first have to build a good reputation for seeing flaws that nobody else has noticed, or build a really, really good case behind your accusation and present the whole thing.
With your comments here, you didn’t do either of those, so they weren’t received very well. But LW isn’t the kind of community that punishes people for having been wrong. If you stick around, and learn the standards of evidence and argumentation that play well here, who knows—you might eventually convince LWers of your point.
So… you personally would have been happier with short descriptions of the experiments suggesting these conclusions, and a bunch of verbose footnotes that discuss some of the complexities of the research, like I’ve done in many other posts?